Global Diary: Morocco

I am sitting by the Atlantic Ocean facing Casablanca’s Mosque Hassan II, named for the Moroccan king who died in 1999. From the mosque’s tower—the world’s tallest minaret—a laser beam shining toward Mecca can be seen for miles. I am here to meet a vocal advocate for Arab women, Aicha Ech-Chenna, whom some call “the Mother Teresa of Morocco.” Aicha and I share a powerful history: Both our lives have been deeply affected by Islamic extremism. Aicha has spent decades fighting for the rights of unwed mothers, who are pariahs in Muslim society; for this, a few religious fanatics have threatened to stone her to death. Ironically, the same kind of people made me a single mom. My husband, Danny, a Wall Street Journal reporter, was slain in 2002 by Islamic radicals in Pakistan when I was five months pregnant.

“What is your son’s name?” Aicha asks warmly, squeezing my hand and searching my face. I tell her my husband chose to call our baby Adam after the first man in the Bible, the Torah and the Koran. “Adam, of course,” she says, tears shining in her deep brown eyes. Suddenly, the call to prayer bursts from the minaret above us, and it feels like it’s coming from the heavens themselves. Aicha turns her palms skyward as if to call her God to look upon the painful realities of our world.
Here in Casablanca, my tenth stop on a round-the-world journey for Glamour, modern and traditional mingle in crowded, dynamic streets. College students in trendy clothes carry Esprit shopping bags alongside women covered head-to-toe in dark fabric, and buildings have satellite dishes on their roofs, like a jungle of giant metallic ears. Morocco is one of the world’s progressive Muslim countries, and its king, Mohammed VI, is an ally of the United States. But Islamic conservatism is pervasive, thanks in part to widespread poverty and illiteracy.

Perhaps no group feels the heavy hand of extremism as deeply as unwed mothers. Because extramarital sex is the ultimate cultural taboo—a crime punishable by imprisonment, although it’s rarely prosecuted—unmarried mothers are ostracized, harassed and even threatened with death by their own families. (So-called honor killings are illegal and rare in Morocco, but do occur, usually in rural areas.) “Single mothers are considered prostitutes,” Aicha says. “They are invisible.” Even if a woman becomes pregnant from rape or incest, she and her baby are shunned by society, like an ocean rejecting waste. Many mothers abandon newborns anywhere they can, sometimes in garbage bins, to avoid the stigma. As a woman, I know that if I were to abandon my child, I would live as a zombie: alive but dead inside.

Most of Morocco’s unwed mothers are poor, illiterate women from the countryside who started working as domestic servants, or “little maids,” as young as age seven, explains Aicha. Handed over into virtual enslavement by their families, the girls spend long hours cooking and cleaning for better-off Moroccans. Their fathers take what little money they make. After years of this, many girls will have sex with any man who promises marriage; countless others are raped. Those who get pregnant often end up on the streets—and worse. “These girls are at risk of being beaten and even killed,” Aicha says.

Aicha, 65, found her calling after meeting a frightened young woman who haunts her to this day. It was 1980, and the woman came to abandon her infant at the public health office where Aicha was employed as a social worker. As a nurse took the child away, “she pulled the baby off his mother’s breast and milk splashed all over his little face,” Aicha recalls. Disturbed by that image, she couldn’t sleep that night. “I kept thinking that the mother needed to nourish her child, but she was too afraid to keep him,” says Aicha, who has been married for 40 years and has four children of her own. She rented a basement office and set up a social work practice just for desperate unmarried young mothers, something no one had ever done.

Soon enough, women sought out Aicha with their tragic stories. One pregnant girl was told by her mother, “Go empty your stomach; then you may come back.” There were girls impregnated by their own fathers or brothers, “the most broken of them all,” says Aicha. She met one girl who wore gaudy makeup, even though she knew that people might mistake her for a prostitute. She told Aicha: “I wear colors to prove that I exist, that I am a real person.”

In 1985, Aicha and a cofounder expanded on her groundbreaking work by starting Solidarity Feminine, the first organization in Morocco dedicated to helping unwed mothers keep and support their babies. To give women job skills, Aicha opened a restaurant in Casablanca and hired 11 single mothers as its staff. Today Solidarity Feminine employs about 60 unwed mothers at two restaurants and a bakery, and provides them with education, child care and health care. The women earn enough to rent their own apartments for about 1,000 dirhams, or $120, a month. Although women usually stay in Aicha’s program for three years, some leave sooner for better-paying jobs. “We help them live with dignity,” says Aicha.

Aicha’s group also provides about 500 unwed mothers a year with much-needed legal aid. A major hurdle for many women is obtaining last names for their babies. In the Arab world, women lack authority to give their newborns a surname; they must ask permission from their fathers or husbands. Without a last name, children cannot get government IDs or attend school—it’s as if they’d never been born. Aicha’s staff convinces reluctant, often angry, men to pass on their names to grandchildren they didn’t know existed. “We politely negotiate with them,” she says. Many of Aicha’s clients also lack IDs because they, too, were born to single women; Aicha helps them get their official paperwork so they can work legally and receive government benefits.

In Solidarity’s tiled kitchen, Khadidja’s hands are dark with coal as she prepares the fire to make a tajine, a traditional dish cooked in a clay pot, for one of the group’s restaurants. Behind her, five girls with cloth-covered hair prepare bread and rice. The only sounds are those of birds and babies, crying in the nursery across the kitchen.

Outside, two Solidarity mothers sit with their toddlers. The women’s names are Badia and Samira, and I’m told that they have been acting rebellious lately. That night I visit them at home. Badia brings me to the four-room apartment she shares with eight other women and their babies. She shows me her 100-square-foot room, for which she pays 50 dirhams, or $6, a week. It has two mattresses, two tin plates and a table with a can of oil. There’s no food in sight.

Badia has a lovely face but her eyes flash with rage. As her 18-month-old boy, Ryan, begins to whine softly, Badia slaps him in the face. “We know nothing but humiliation,” Badia says. “It’s killing us, and we can’t help but take it out on our kids.” Badia explains that she is verbally assaulted whenever she walks down the street. (Single moms are routinely harassed in public, according to Aicha. “They can be identified because they aren’t with a man,” she says.) Ryan looks at me, and I can’t find even curiosity in those sad little eyes. I wonder what sins these women and babies are being punished for, but then remember that because of Aicha, they have each other to hold on to.

Aicha has faced great dangers in her work. In 2000, an extremist imam issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, calling for her to be stoned to death. “I’m not afraid,” she says, “because I’ve done nothing wrong.” Soon after, she gave an unprecedented interview to Al Jazeera denouncing the stigma on unwed motherhood. She hit a nerve. “People called me from all over the country agreeing, saying I couldn’t let the Islamists win,” she says. More astonishing, the king summoned her to his palace and awarded her the Medal of Honor. “Please don’t give up,” he told her.

Perhaps Aicha’s greatest achievement is inspiring a new generation of women activists. I meet Nabila Tbeur, 34, who works for INSAF (National Institute for Distressed Women), another Casablanca group that helps unwed moms get job training, child care and health benefits.

Nabila explains that single motherhood is not just a problem of poverty; even educated, affluent women are affected. “The shame attached to sex outside marriage runs deeper than the blood in our veins,” she says. I meet Zoulikha, who wears a veil with jeans and sneakers, while she’s typing on a computer. Her baby, Youssef, is just three weeks old. Zoulikha, 22, was an unmarried college student when she got pregnant. Now, she says, “I’ll keep my baby and go back to school, insha’allah [God willing].”

Today, at peace with her God and her king, Aicha finds strength in knowing that others, like Nabila, are fighting alongside her. In her struggle for the dignity of all mothers and children, Aicha has displayed true faith; she’s proof that an individual with determination and courage can win against those who advocate blind hatred. On the morning of my departure, we see each other one last time, mostly to hug. Aicha tells me to hug my son Adam for her too. Then she shakes her head and says, “I can’t believe you are a single mother. May Allah bless your husband and son. May He bless your soul.”

Mariane Pearl is a documentary filmmaker and the author of A Mighty Heart: The Brave Life and Death of My Husband, Danny Pearl. In the June issue of Glamour, read an interview with Mariane and Angelina Jolie, who will portray her in the film A Mighty Heart, opening this month.